Middle School Students Tutor Their Peers In Writing

Sixth-grader Jacob Rupert's writing assignment was a challenge: Write a paragraph on the topic of his choice without using the letter "d." Jacob had chosen to write about the aroma of pies, but he couldn't use the word "smelled."

Newly minted as a student writing tutor, Teagan Fransen, also a sixth-grader at Ashford School, sat with Jacob and politely asked him what he thought he could do to make his paragraph more concise. She offered him some tips on word choice and complimented his sentence structure.

Teagan and 14 other student tutors in sixth to eighth grade at Ashford School have been learning over the past 18 weeks how to coach their peers on writing. Monday was the first day the student tutors got to try out their tutoring skills.

A few feet from Teagan and Jacob, seventh-grader A.J. Connelly suggested to another student that he include some supporting details — maybe a quote or a statistic — in his paper.

"When you tutor an actual student you have to break the ice and make them comfortable," explained A.J., who said he might want to be a teacher when he gets older. He added that the experience was fun but different.

Janet Lussier, a teacher who is the director of the school's writing center, has worked since 2009 to launch the program at Ashford. She said she was excited to learn in August that the University of Connecticut's Writing Center had chosen her middle school for its program.

"The tutors have already been great, and their own teachers have noticed improvement in their writing," Lussier said.

Lussier said she attended seminars and workshops led by Jason Courtmanche, director of the Connecticut Writing Project, where she gained ideas on middle school writing centers, such as to shift the focus from spelling and grammar to more "high order concerns, like organization and ideas."

Courtmanche's program works closely with Tom Deans, director of the UConn Writing Center, who chooses university students to send to the schools to train younger students in tutoring.

Deans said his program develops versions of the UConn Writing Center that are appropriate for middle schools and high schools. Deans' program spends a year preparing a school like Ashford to run its own writing center, then moves on to a new school.

Deans said schools that want the support have to prove they are ready for it.

"The school has to want us there and make a commitment through dedicated teachers that come out of Jason's program," Deans said. "We don't want to go away after a year and have it fall apart."

Monday's tutoring session was held during the last class of the day. Teachers from any grade can sign up to have their students tutored in the writing center, and once the students arrive, the tutors take over and run the meetings on their own.

UConn graduate student Jessica Mueller oversaw the Ashford program. She and five UConn undergraduate volunteers from the UConn Writing Center trained the middle school students on how to tutor and how a writing center works.

Now that the tutor training is over, Mueller said, the UConn students will still stay around to work out any kinks.

Tran Tran, a junior at UConn who is studying English, said they "started off the program by showing the students how to make better writers, not just how to make better papers," and that the tutors have progressed a lot in their own writing since September.

Tatiana Mercado, a junior communications major at UConn and one of the student volunteers, said, "We've been with these kids for a year. We're excited to see how they do."